Hello again, friends and readers. If you’ve read the rest of this blog, you’ve read much, my notions of the greatest speeches of star trek, my discussion of the series, my admittedly exhaustive and maybe exhausting treatment of Deep Space Nine. I wrote in my very first posting that I wanted to deal with those things first so that when I got to something I didn’t like, you’d still listen. Well that time has come. This post is devoted exclusively to the Star Trek 2009 movie. If you loved the movie, good for you. I hope you will still listen to what I have to say and consider it. If you were indifferent to it, or if you, like me, were deeply disappointed and upset by it, possibly this will articulate some of your own concerns.
One thing I’ve learned over the years about giving feedback or reviewing things is that it’s a good idea to at least start with positives. The 2009 movie has one thing going for it. It was a great ideal. Not, idea, but ideal. I can sympathize with the frustrations of people like Leonard Nemoy, who has often expressed the opinion that the original star trek is often overlooked in favor of newer star trek. We younger fans should remember that for twenty years, the only star trek in existence was the show that came on television in 1966. It wasn’t until 1987, after the original star trek had spawned both an animated series and four feature films, that any new star trek was created. Now, it seems as though many people my age and younger have little appreciation for the original television series and the things it stands for. The movie tries to address that concern and draw our attention back to those original characters, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and all the rest, and for that effort, I call it a good ideal.
Like any ideal, there is often a wide gulf between thought and execution. The result was, to state it bluntly, a disappointment to all of the star trek that came before it. Now, I have to acknowledge right here that I seem to be in the minority on this. The International Movie Database ranks the film with 8.1 out of 10, based on 1356 ratings, and Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 94% positive, with 270 out of 286 reviews being positive. Most people I have talked to either loved it, or are at least ok with it, seeing it as an overall good effort. That puts me in the minority. I do not “love” it, nor can I bring myself to call it even a good effort. So the first thing I asked myself is, am I wrong? Is it me? Do thousands of people see things here that I simply do not? So, I watched it again, and again. I’ve probably seen it half a dozen times, and I’ve even read the novelization of the movie written by Alan Dean Foster. I know the movie as well as I know the ten that came before it, and I am as yet unconvinced. Can I, some would ask, really go against public opinion like that? If ten thousand people love a thing, who am I to dare to say that they are wrong to do so, or that the thing is bad? Well, the right of a thing is not made certain, simply because the majority of people think so. Nor is a minority, even a small one, wrong about something, simply because its numbers are small. Lastly, before I get into the movie, let me say this. I realize that this is America, and everyone is entitled to their opinions. It’s not easy to say that an opinion is wrong. You can’t say it in the same way that you can demonstrate that what someone claims to be a fact is wrong. But that doesn’t make the opinion informed or worth acting upon. So in the sense that you can say it of opinions, most people today are wrong about Star Trek 2009. Here is why.
Let’s start with the title. Well, that’s the first problem. It doesn’t have one. The addition of the year, 2009, is a convenient way of referencing the thing. But so far as I’ve been able to determine, the movie has no title. Now, folks, we’ve been here before. The first star trek movie, the one that came out in 1979, doesn’t have a title either. It’s called, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That’s like me writing a novel and calling it, The Novel. Well, it was the first star trek movie ever made, and it was by no means certain that any more would be, not ever. So the first star trek movie gets a pass on not having a title. What was ST 2009 Director J.J. Abrams’ problem then? Was he just lacking inspiration? Could no one in Hollywood settle on a title? I have to say, you know something’s likely to suck if no one can decide what to call it. Essentially, it’s called nothing at all. Star Trek. That’s as close to a title as you get. The book also doesn’t have a title. On audible.com, it’s listed as, “Star Trek Movie Tie-In.” If I’m lying I’m dying. Was this the best, the absolute best, that the production and marketing juggernaut that is Hollywood could actually do? And if it was, I ask you, what does that suggest about the quality of the film itself? I remind you, Star Trek I didn’t do that well at the box office, and while it’s story is ok, it’s not rated as anyone’s number one favorite either. So, here we go again, another star trek film without a title. They keep doing that, and even I’m going to have a hard time keeping the movies straight.
Now to the story itself. I’m not going to summarize it here, because I’m assuming that if you’re bothering to read this, you’ve seen the movie. The first and one of the most difficult questions that comes up is, how should we understand this story in light of all the rest of the star trek universe? The words used to describe what Star Trek 2009 is meant to be include terms like, “reboot,” and “reimagination.” What does that mean? Does this single movie negate all the rest of star trek? Should we say that all the rest never happens now, or happens completely differently because this movie came along? I don’t think that’s the intent. The only other viable option is to consider the movie as a parallel universe star trek that doesn’t affect our own timeline, much like the Mirror Universe that shows up from time to time in the series. Either way, this question of continuity is a dangerous one where time travel is concerned, and it remains unresolved. So, I cannot place this movie in the events of the main star trek universe. It simply doesn’t fit. If I do place it there, it destroys all of star trek history that follows it. So, it does not belong, and if I wanted to, I could dismiss it right there as not being historical star trek and not say another word about it. That’s not even something I could do with the series, Star Trek Enterprise, but we could with this movie and we wouldn’t lose a thing by doing so. But that would not be very thorough of me, and so I will go on.
Let’s consider the characters. I find the young Kirk and the young McCoy believable. I can believe that Jim Kirk would act as he does at that age, and I can see what McCoy will be through the portrayal of the younger man in the movie. However, the movie’s portrayal of the young Spock is galling. In one scene, we spy him and Uhura kissing in an Enterprise turbolift. What the hell is this? Are we seriously supposed to believe this? The movie implies that Spock and Uhura have had a thing going for some time, and I ask again, are we seriously supposed to buy this? I can’t blame Zackary Quinto for that; as an actor, you act the script you are given. But I expected much more from the story writers. Then, there’s the matter of the Romulan commander, Nero. Nero? Really? Seriously? Nero, as in the Roman emperor, was the best they could do? And they even made him a bit crazy, seemingly in imitation of the actual Nero. And again I ask, this is the best they could come up with? Moreover, Nero isn’t a well-rounded villain. He has no depth, unlike other villains in the movies: Kahn, Sibok, Shinzon, and so on. Characters we know much more about. He’s very flat, almost not there, much like everyone else in the story. The rest of my talk about Nero will have to wait until I get to the plot of the movie, however.
Let’s talk about the language and dialogue of the movie. As a linguist, I’m probably more apt to notice the structure of dialogue more readily than most, and quite a bit jumped out at me. Simply put, I can’t believe these characters because of how they talk. They talk like twentieth or twenty-first century action heroes in a present-day thriller film. Even the Romulans sound like something you’d hear in Lethal Weapon III or The Hunt for Red October. I can’t credit a Romulan with saying, “gonna,” or, “We’ve gotta…” Yet, they do. Even Kirk’s language is a bit offbeat. When Ayel is choking him, he says, “I’ve got your gun,” and shoots him. Now, leaving the scene aside, “gun,” is not a star trek era word. It sounds a bit odd in that time period, and certainly is almost never the word used when referring to an energy weapon. The language and dialogue as a whole are kitschy. The story isn’t really propelled by them at all, because it relies mostly, almost exclusively, on flashy action. Speaking as someone who recently examined star trek for its greatest speeches and as someone who has read hundreds and hundreds of great quotes from the shows and films, this movie is pretty disappointing on that score.
Now we come to the plot. I’m not sure where to begin here. The backstory is that a star somewhere near Romulus was going supernova, and Spock was racing to inject “red matter” into the sun to save it. Spock fails, the sun goes nova, Romulus is destroyed, and Nero captures our Spock, drags him back through time and tells him he’s going to watch revenge on an epic scale. This to me sounds like exactly the sort of backstory you’d throw together if you’re a writer who is desperately grasping at straws, trying to make your impossible story mesh with what’s already been done in a series or universe like this one. It’s shoddily put together, poorly explained, and has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. What is red matter? Why was Spock the single person in all the universe, let alone in the Romulan Empire, who could have possibly saved the star? Who exactly is Nero and why does he have access to time travel? These are only a few questions that the backstory, as explained by the elder Spock, leaves open.
As to the actual plot, this is the worst time-travel story I’ve seen. Nero’s ship first appears in the year 2233 and takes on the Kelvin. We next here of it about 20 years later when it attacks the Klingon fleet and heads for Vulcan, beginning the movie’s main story line. So where was it for most of Kirk’s life? I don’t recall that that question was answered. Did it just hang out for all the years between its engaging the Kelvin and when it shows up again in the story? What was the elder Spock doing for all those years? And those are just plot holes, to say nothing of what’s actually done. Now let’s talk about this red matter business. Star trek’s playing with science is well-known, but even within the loose liberties star trek as a whole takes with physics, I find this hard to believe. What is red matter? And how does falling into a black hole send you back in time? Even our science wouldn’t buy that one. If you actually fall into the event horizon of a quantum singularity, you don’t come out in your time or in any other. So one of the story’s main plot devices falls apart right there. And as for triggering a quantum singularity within a planet’s core, is it me, or has no one else pointed out that even if you could do that, nothing orbiting the planet would survive? The Enterprise would’ve been sucked in right along with the Nerada and the planet Vulcan itself. They would’ve been too close to the event horizon of the black hole to escape its gravity. But I leave the science to the physicists. Moving on. So, Spock, when Kirk argues with him, boots him off the ship and strands him on Delta Vega. Really? I find that to be an extreme overreaction for Spock who, at that point, was acting logically and arguing with Kirk rationally, as we know Spock to do. The justification for that is incredibly flimsy. Last note on that, Delta Vega, as revealed in the star trek Pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” is somewhere near the galactic outer rim. That’s many light years away from where the Enterprise was at the time. No escape pod could ever have reached that planet. One final plot detail. I could say much more about the actual plot, but I don’t want to. At the end of the movie, Kirk is granted the rank of captain and is given the Enterprise. Now, I accept that his actions were exceptionally heroic, given the circumstances, and I accept that even as a cadet, he was thrust into responsibilities and decisions for which he wasn’t prepared, and that he did very well. At least as far as the internal plot structure goes. But this? Give him a medal, waive his last year at the academy and promote him to ensign straight off, or lieutenant if you’re feeling generous. But to grant him, a youth of maybe 21, an instant captaincy and the flagship of the Federation fleet right off the bat? No. I don’t see that one happening. I found that incredibly difficult to believe.
I could go on nitpicking the plot, the characters, the discontinuities, forever. But to what end? It’s time now to move on to the deep and fundamental objections, to which all the rest are merely surface-level indicators. Star trek, as I have said again and again and again, has endured and has stood on its feet for forty-five years because of its ability to speak to universal questions, to draw our attention to the ultimate questions, to the moral truths, to questions of conscience that plague us all now in the twenty-first century. All the rest of my blog, what’s come before and what will come after this, is a testament to its ability to do that. This movie very gladly sacrifices all that. This movie, this reimagination, guts star trek of everything that has made it endure in the minds and hearts of people for almost three generations, leaving us with an action thriller that replaces good storytelling with flashy action and cheap thrills. And while I’m in the minority on this one, I’m not alone. The famous movie critic Roger Ebert, as in Sisko and Ebert, said in his review that the Roddenberry era of star trek, when the shows dealt with questions of science, ideals and philosophy, seem to be forever gone, replaced by stories containing only “loud and colorful action.” In Newsweek, Mark Bain suggests that star trek has now lost its moral relevance, a feature that has been a driving part of it since time immemorial. One of the most interesting things I read was found in SLATE, where Juliet Lapidos discusses the torture scene in the movie where Nero’s trying to get information out of Pike. She compares it with the topic of torture that comes up in the Next Generation episode, “Chain of Command.” That’s the one where Picard is captured by the Cardassians and tortured. She finds that the TNG episode dealt with the subject of torture in a more sophisticated way, drawing real parallels between it and the controversy about enhanced interrogation techniques in the U.S. Well, I don’t know if the TNG handling of torture was more “sophisticated” or not, but it was certainly more psychologically involved and the story line was a ton better. So I can see why she prefers the TNG episode for dealing with that subject.
Why, though? Why would the makers of star trek today give up everything that has made star trek what it has been? Well, because it sells. It’s that simple. I’ve come to the conclusion that many fans are no longer interested in thinking. They don’t want a good show that might make them think. They just want the good show part, action without depth. My fiancé said it best, “this is the thing we get when Star Trek is made to breed with today's obsession with action movies, shallow plots that barely make sense, decided
on by those who don't care if the storytelling is bad, if characters don't act like themselves, as long as the end product sells.” Well, the movie grossed over eight billion dollars at the box office. Maybe she’s right. What I’m afraid of, as the sequel approaches, is summed up in another comment of hers, “maybe 2009 marks the end of real star trek.” Maybe it does. Maybe it does at that. I can hope it doesn’t. I still care about good storytelling, and I still want to see shows that deal with those eternally relevant questions. Shows like DS9’s “In The Pale Moonlight,” like TNG’s “The Measure of a Man,” like Voyager’s “Critical Care,” and like the original series’ episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Wil those days ever come again? Does star trek’s future lie now in movies like the 2009 film? Wil someone make a series or a movie like those I mentiond here? For an answer to my last question, I’m put in mind of how Spock once put it, “there are always possibilities.”
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